I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
This. I worked as a network/computer guy for the architecture department at our university. They all had iMacs, which for me was quite a win because replacing/carrying them was super easy: disconnect power chord, carry to my desk - done. Fix or install whatever needs fixing, and simple carry back.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
No, but if you're on a 3-5 year refresh cycle and this is your year, it'd be lame to not have the latest chip!
It's simpler and better for both hardware makers and buyers to just keep refreshing instead of trying to get clever about who deserves the current series of chips in their form factor, assuming the refreshes are of similar cost, utility etc.
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
I asked Claude to come up with 7 problems to solve that were not part of any benchmarks. Besides speed, I asked it to put together a scoring that would reflect models that perform well on the 7 problems and in a reasonable time-frame (RWS, the definition is in the artifact). I valued models that produced good answers in a reasonable time better than models that had very high throughput but kept spitting useless stuff. Overall, IIRC most of them still had a >30% chance of producing wrong/non-working replies.
I then tested Strata ( https://github.com/niko1221/strata ) and the results are not even close. You can basically ignore everything in that table and use Strata instead, you can use bigger/less-quantized models and have way better results. Basically any otherwise-decent model degrades noticeably at Q < 5, and KV cache at Q4 also contributes a lot.
Still, a 20$/mo Claude subscription is way cheaper/more efficient if you code 2-3h in the evening than running stuff locally, unless you really have hardware than can hold models that get most things right at the first try. You can iterate way faster and cover a lot more ground in 2-3h using a Claude subscription, or OpenRouter if you prefer to change models. You get faster replies that are 99% correct at the first try, whereas using the local model you'd be spending 30% of your time fixing things that don't work and prompting it to do better.
Nowadays I use the local model to delegate tasks that would burn a lot of tokens, like sifting through big data archives for indexing and such.
The easiest thing to do (takes 5 minutes) is to use LMStudio and then search for the model inside LMStudios UI.
It will show you on the model selection IF a model fits and if you use a "Qwen 3.8-35B-A3B" type of model, it should just work out of the box. A3B stands for Active which means you need a lot less fast ram.
You will run into issues fast though: If you have big tasks for it to do, your pc/mac will get warm very fast and noisy and you will cosume relevant more energy.
Dense models are not well suited to this. Depends on your system, but most inference engines let you put the KV cache on the host. They should let you use "Q8" KV cache format as well which takes half the storage of bf16, the default format. You essentially are stuck at having to fit the entire dense model into VRAM because it must compute across the entire model every token. Without it being in VRAM it is slow. MoE models such as Qwen 35B with 3B active parameters are much friendlier to limited VRAM systems. This is why you see systems with 16GB of VRAM running something like DeepSeek Flash if they have a bit of spare system RAM. Usually not at any good token rate, but tolerable.
Dense models also don't like quantization as much and are less tolerant of it. There are some very interesting smaller models like https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Labs-Dory1.0-4... Dory that I would check out. You need system RAM or to stream a larger MoE model from disk and it won't be fast. You need to specialize the models some to get quality results if you have very limited system resources.
My setup is a Ryzen 3600, 90GB DDR4 allocated to a VM (don’t even really need that much, just had it available, special thanks to the year 2024), and an RX 9060XT 16GB ($500 GPU).
I get around 40-60 tok/s depending on the quantization level I choose.
As you can see, the CPU is nothing special, don’t even need DDR5.
Yes it runs on all levels of hardware - with the latest Strata my 5090 and 64GB DDR5 gets 200-240 tok/sec decode, 6500 tok/sec prefill. Around $0.09/M tokens in power usage (have excess solar capacity).
Jealous, lol. But I did spend a grand total of $500 for my setup. The rest of the server was built purchased with the use case of running game servers.
AI harnesses like Claude will set it all up for you, you can just say "I want to run a localllm on this machine" and it will find the best one for your hardware and even help you fine tune it etc
You will end up with a sub-par result. The space for small models is more specialized and specific and you should optimize to the specific task and or tasks you want to do. It will get some local model working, but there are a lot of interesting small models in the 4-10B space to look at and play with for your specific tasks. If you expect a full agentic coding agent it's just not going to happen without a larger model like Qwen 35B and ... that is not that great by today's standards, even Muse Glimmer is better.
After arguing and back and forth with Claude (not straight away), it found a kv streaming fork of llama https://github.com/achyudh/llama.cpp and an interesting ascii only model Qwen3.8-27B-ASCII-Condensed-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf . It's running, i'll see how it goes.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
Waiting is never a stupid decision because you can always save a good deal on apple refurbished. I got a mac on bestbuy refurbished a couple years ago shortly after it was released. It had like 4 cycles on the battery and I saved hundreds.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. And you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
What is it with fabs where there is just no competition springing up outside the existing memory cartels? Is the knowledge of how to build and run a fab strictly controlled by these companies? Is all qualified talent just immediately poached and put behind NDA and noncompetes? It just makes no sense. Capitalism would suggest these conditions with so much unstable equilibrium in this market would see increase in supply to take advantage of the pricing. The fact that this isn't playing out as such suggests there are some very powerful thumbs on the scale of this "free" market.
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
I jest...but I'm disgusted by the price gouging going on. Glad my hardware is relatively recent and I had mostly maxed out already when I bought it a few years back. The same setup today would be closer to $7k with equivalent parts.
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
Desktop maybe, but Imac that costs more for the same specs of the mini you can shove in the drawer in a desk? I mean with the airspace taken up by an imac you only remotely connect to you could probably have two side by side stacks of I don't know, maybe 20 mac minis each? HPC territory.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
An imac doesn't strike me as a desktop with proper cooling. Maybe they do some funny business in the chassis, but its pretty clear that airflow has been put on the bench in favor of having a sexy thin backside.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
I think it's mainly that from 2006 to 2019, the iMac was the only mid-tier desktop that Apple sold. Today, you can get a Mac mini or MBP that's the same or faster than an iMac.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small.
My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that.
(Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.
I’ve felt the same way since way back then ever since reading about this guy’s setup[0], so I paired a 11” MBA with the quad core Mac Mini 2012.
I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.
It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small.
My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
I understand that, but they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6, which was not planned. If they need higher RAM they can go M5 Pro/Max (outside of iMac form factor) or wait hopefully for newer iMac Pro variants in the future.
To be honest, I doubt we're going to see iMacs with very high RAM any time soon. RAM is expensive and most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor, not get an all-in-one with a small-ish screen.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.
I have a 60hz monitor and a 144hz monitor and I simply can't tell the difference in normal usage. I can see a difference on something like http://testufo.com if I specifically look for it, and until I checked that I assumed the OS was just lying to me and the monitor was actually set to 60hz.
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.
I don't understand why someone would buy this. It's $1700 for the same computer as a $900 Mac mini. The antiquated 24" monitor, keyboard, and mouse are not worth the extra $800. You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
That 32" monitor will have a crappy pixel density. It's incredibly hard to find good external monitors that are not made by Apple, definitely not for $800. Apple will give you a display with a high pixel density and glass front.
There are some 32" 6144x3456 monitors nowadays and they occasionally dip to the $800 range when on sale [1]. But for a more direct comparison, the Kuycon P20 looks very Apple-like, matches the 4.5K resolution of the iMac, and is $799 for its regular price [2].
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/comments/1v87f6i/moni...
[2] https://kuycon.us/monitors/P20
The P20 is a 28" display so is much lower pixel density than the iMac.
Never heard of this brand up until now. Design is indeed Apple-ish, are the panels any good?
A glass front is a negative. Reflections always get in the way, and they therefore don't comply with worker safety rules in some countries.
Nanotexture is an option now, to get a matte finish and cut down on reflections.
Specifically the iMac has a 24" 4.5K panel (4480x2520), and supports P3 color. And if the glass front is a problem, nano-texture glass is available for an extra $200 (although only on the higher-end config).
probably niche, but we have an m4 iMac mounted to a built in desk in our kitchen. my family of 4 all have MacBooks, but the iMac gets heavy usage by all of us. kids will sit and do homework there, wife adds things to her grocery list, keeps her personal mailbox clean, does basic household web tasks. I use it to do household tech chore work, pay bills, etc when everybody is hanging around the kitchen. We all use our computers too, but the convenience factor of it's already on, powered, connected and ready to go is a draw and leads us to magnetize to it when we need it. I love it the most as I think it keeps us present with each other vs going off to a private space to do those sorts of things. Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
> Yeah we could just as easily drag our laptops into the kitchen but then you end up finding a comfy spot on the couch or for the kids in their rooms.
I've been feeling that: much about keeping my sanity in this age is about noticing those patterns we keep falling in and arranging for "easier" ways to fall into healthier patterns. The annoying thing is that it doesn't seem that those "unhealthy" patterns were that easy to predict in order to avoid. Like some 15 years ago would it have been as obvious that we would get to such a consistently predictable pattern of "comfy spot on the couch or bed" and the unhealthy social and personal repercussions of that?
I just wish I start being able to predict those pitfalls earlier than the current few years per tech evolution.
It is a design piece. No wires besides the single power chord. Yet webcam and speakers working.
Yeah this thing is built for desk reception
This has been confusing us computer nerds since the first iMac in 1998.
Regular people want their homes to look nice. It's really important to them. We may think it's weird and stupid, but that's who they are, and it decides what computers they buy.
This. I worked as a network/computer guy for the architecture department at our university. They all had iMacs, which for me was quite a win because replacing/carrying them was super easy: disconnect power chord, carry to my desk - done. Fix or install whatever needs fixing, and simple carry back.
They even put the (optional, by default it's wireless only) 2.5G Ethernet socket in the external power brick.
I have been back and forth with my wife about replacing the old intel based iMac she still uses. Because she does use FaceTime on it every day, she has been rejecting the idea of getting Mac mini + a monitor because I couldn't find a monitor with a comparable built-in camera. And to be fair, I might be able to hide the Mac mini, so it's just the monitor on her desk, but a webcam tucked on top of it, with the extra cabling does break a clean desk look. I haven't checked monitors with built-in cameras lately, so any recommendations would be much appreciated!
Apple's displays are great if you want to have the flexibility of a Mac mini. They're expensive as hell, but overall a great display if you want to plug something into a Mac and not have to fuss around with cables, etc.
Lenovo sells such a display. Built in mic, cam and speakers.
It’s also a usb c dock with a Ethernet port
People need (!) this type of devices in representative settings, eg the reception of a boutique hotel.
How is an all-in-one better than a mini attached to the back of a monitor, or better yet locked in a cabinet for security?
It looks nicer. What you’re suggesting has either a brick attached on the back and/or at least two cables (but probably more).
>a mini attached to the back of a monitor
It is ugly. Especially i places like a reception, where the back of the screen is facing the customer. Plain and simple.
Good point, but do these settings need the latest M-series chip then, too?
No, but if you're on a 3-5 year refresh cycle and this is your year, it'd be lame to not have the latest chip!
It's simpler and better for both hardware makers and buyers to just keep refreshing instead of trying to get clever about who deserves the current series of chips in their form factor, assuming the refreshes are of similar cost, utility etc.
These places aren't going to care about saving $200 on a machine that will return an order of magnitude or more than that in sales per hour
Since this is exactly what I am searching for, maybe someone here can help:
Does anyone know of a good looking display, just a slab on a stand like imacs or Studio displays?
I want something good looking for the Linux PC in my living room but almost all monitors out there are just plain ugly and bulky. Ideally 27-32" but at this point i dont really care anymore...
Thanks!
Have you tried Samsung? They have designs that mimic Apple, though probably plastic.
A single object to hand your kid for their dorm that will move every 8 months is much nicer than a bunch of parts and wires.
No, that's called a laptop.
A mini would add one extra part (the mini) and two extra cables (power + thunderbolt). The mini can be attached to the back of the monitor eliminating the extra part. How is that harder?
So you’ve roughly doubled the number of parts, with risk of separating and losing them. It can be attached, but after locating and using an after-market device of unknown quality that requires initiative to set up. And then you have a power button in some weird place, not to mention now having to mind two power buttons. Some people will be confused when they turn on the monitor and nothing happens.
Anyone commenting on this forum is not going to mind looking after those parts and buying a mounting solution. Apple sells enough iMacs to show that most people have priorities and inclinations that differ from the people who comment on this forum.
You just explained it. Extra cables, potential mounting hardware… when disassembled is also more to pack up, move, and set back up.
You might not think it’s much harder, but it’s harder.
bringing a stationary desktop to the dorms has never been the correct decision
lan parties, dude!
But why not just buy a Macbook at that point?
Gotta say they do look amazing in hotel check ins, shop desks, retail etc.
1. Social signalling
2. Aesthetic
3. Pretty colors
4. Nostalgia
I agree. In the case of the older 27" iMacs-- you couldn't really get a 5K screen of that quality for any reasonable cost. It made it actually useful.
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
But they aren't Apple.
No, most of them aren't 6k.
> You can buy a very nice 32" monitor and better input devices for less than that.
As with many things, you pay for the atheistics.
I'm not sure of anything that fits the bill. Are you?
I wish they would make big displays again. Like 32” big 6K.
24” or even 27” feels like such a downgrade.
Also please make the iMacs usable as external monitors agains. Would buy one as a “livingroom computer” instantly if it was also possible to occasionally use it as a docking station for an air..
I've been using a new program called RetinaRelay[0] to use my 5k iMac as a second display for my M1 Macbook using an ethernet (or Thunderbolt for even better performance). Works brilliantly. It's definitely higher latency than a normal monitor (my ethernet connection is 45ms vs 5ms for a monitor) but it's not noticeable for coding and miles better than remote desktop or similar.
[0] https://www.retinarelay.com/
Cool, I suppose it doesn’t work with windows? To use a 5k iMac as monitor to my windows desktop?
I think you will find that 4K is generally sufficient at 32". Text is sharp enough, and a high refresh rate is probably more important at that point. There is also the issue that not even a 5090 can push enough fps at resolutions higher than 4K in demanding games.
4k stretched to 32 is awful. screen door very visible. honestly it’s not even quite enough for 27.
Oh to be young again. I use a 43" Samsung TV at 4K. That works for me. The 32" 4K monitor next to it I run at 2560x1440, you know, so I can read it...
Apple have never released a 32" version of the iMac; even the iMac Pro was only available as a 27" model.
To me, it doesn't make sense, I would go a Mac Studio with multiple screens instead a big 32, but some people love working with one monitor.
Thats my setup - Mac Studio with two 32” monitors.
Would just be nice if I could buy the monitors from apple too.
Completely agree.
iPad docking station too
I’m still angry that they deprecated target display mode. For a company that talks so much about recycling it’s really messed up they don’t support it. Such an amazing way to give life to old but incredible monitors - you’d have to spend $1000+ to get anything remotely resembling the quality of that display. You can’t even use ones that previously supported it on current Mac’s.
Absolutely. The display on the iMac 5K was amazing. Ended up giving that machine to a nephew of mine when I moved to Apple Silicon but Apple really dropped the ball here.
If you have a 27" iMac with the Retina display then you can get a kit to transform it into a monitor.
You can't continue to support Target Display mode when the connectors and cables of the day don't yet support 5k displays.
If you have an older 5k iMac, there is an inexpensive third party hardware kit to convert it into a display with modern connectors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VXQu0fAc8s
There are countless non-5k iMacs. I never said it had to be that. I had a beautiful 27” 2.5k display I could’ve put to work
The strangest thing is that with Thunderbolt 4+ you could easily do this in software only I suppose?
There are third party apps like Luna Display that do this now.
We're getting close to local AI being really useful. Before the M1 is dead we might have already seen a huge shift. In my mind, there are two types of macs: those that have the bandwidth to run local models (Max & Ultra) and those that don't (Base & Pro chips).
The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth. When that day comes, I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
Local AI already is really useful. This has been true since Qwen Flash Next and Qwen 3.8 27B rolled out. The struggle with exactly 64GB of unified RAM is that you end up having to stream the engram table from SSD because you will need almost all of your 64GB to run QFN. A 27B dense model still runs a little slow, even on an M1 Max Mac. However if you have even an older gaming GPU with 12-16GB of RAM and enough system RAM you can run this model (QFN) at a very respectable token rate and intelligence level. It is a Sonnet 5 class model you can run at home. There are new quantization techniques that make these models very good at agentic tasks.
And now if you stretch you can run DeepSeek Flash 4.1.
And if you were willing to roll up your sleeves you could build your own AI lab at home and run this model and models like GLM Flash 5.3 and DeepSeek Flash V4.1 at lower quants. The budget GPUs (like V100) are kind of not budget now, but still <5K to acquire 128GB of fast VRAM that can compete with a 5090 and actually has a lot more interesting options available IMO.
Can share a good way of running Qwen 3.8 27B (or similar) on 16GB VRAM? I've been trying but I end up with either a heavily quantized model or a small context or a slow speed.
I've benchmarked quite a few models on my 9070XT, and I basically gave up hope of using models locally: https://claude.ai/artifact/77pHgucqQNsmic8ZEnqdBA
I asked Claude to come up with 7 problems to solve that were not part of any benchmarks. Besides speed, I asked it to put together a scoring that would reflect models that perform well on the 7 problems and in a reasonable time-frame (RWS, the definition is in the artifact). I valued models that produced good answers in a reasonable time better than models that had very high throughput but kept spitting useless stuff. Overall, IIRC most of them still had a >30% chance of producing wrong/non-working replies.
I then tested Strata ( https://github.com/niko1221/strata ) and the results are not even close. You can basically ignore everything in that table and use Strata instead, you can use bigger/less-quantized models and have way better results. Basically any otherwise-decent model degrades noticeably at Q < 5, and KV cache at Q4 also contributes a lot.
Still, a 20$/mo Claude subscription is way cheaper/more efficient if you code 2-3h in the evening than running stuff locally, unless you really have hardware than can hold models that get most things right at the first try. You can iterate way faster and cover a lot more ground in 2-3h using a Claude subscription, or OpenRouter if you prefer to change models. You get faster replies that are 99% correct at the first try, whereas using the local model you'd be spending 30% of your time fixing things that don't work and prompting it to do better.
Nowadays I use the local model to delegate tasks that would burn a lot of tokens, like sifting through big data archives for indexing and such.
The easiest thing to do (takes 5 minutes) is to use LMStudio and then search for the model inside LMStudios UI.
It will show you on the model selection IF a model fits and if you use a "Qwen 3.8-35B-A3B" type of model, it should just work out of the box. A3B stands for Active which means you need a lot less fast ram.
You will run into issues fast though: If you have big tasks for it to do, your pc/mac will get warm very fast and noisy and you will cosume relevant more energy.
And as you mention: yeah small context!
Its still not that practical in my opinion.
I have been trying to setup LMstudio for hours and the model downloads always fail. Looks like my vpn is blocked somehow/somewhere :/
Dense models are not well suited to this. Depends on your system, but most inference engines let you put the KV cache on the host. They should let you use "Q8" KV cache format as well which takes half the storage of bf16, the default format. You essentially are stuck at having to fit the entire dense model into VRAM because it must compute across the entire model every token. Without it being in VRAM it is slow. MoE models such as Qwen 35B with 3B active parameters are much friendlier to limited VRAM systems. This is why you see systems with 16GB of VRAM running something like DeepSeek Flash if they have a bit of spare system RAM. Usually not at any good token rate, but tolerable.
Dense models also don't like quantization as much and are less tolerant of it. There are some very interesting smaller models like https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Labs-Dory1.0-4... Dory that I would check out. You need system RAM or to stream a larger MoE model from disk and it won't be fast. You need to specialize the models some to get quality results if you have very limited system resources.
If you have enough system RAM (64GB), you can run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with a GPU as small as 12GB, this repo is pretty amazing:
https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata/
My setup is a Ryzen 3600, 90GB DDR4 allocated to a VM (don’t even really need that much, just had it available, special thanks to the year 2024), and an RX 9060XT 16GB ($500 GPU).
I get around 40-60 tok/s depending on the quantization level I choose.
As you can see, the CPU is nothing special, don’t even need DDR5.
Yes it runs on all levels of hardware - with the latest Strata my 5090 and 64GB DDR5 gets 200-240 tok/sec decode, 6500 tok/sec prefill. Around $0.09/M tokens in power usage (have excess solar capacity).
Jealous, lol. But I did spend a grand total of $500 for my setup. The rest of the server was built purchased with the use case of running game servers.
AI harnesses like Claude will set it all up for you, you can just say "I want to run a localllm on this machine" and it will find the best one for your hardware and even help you fine tune it etc
You will end up with a sub-par result. The space for small models is more specialized and specific and you should optimize to the specific task and or tasks you want to do. It will get some local model working, but there are a lot of interesting small models in the 4-10B space to look at and play with for your specific tasks. If you expect a full agentic coding agent it's just not going to happen without a larger model like Qwen 35B and ... that is not that great by today's standards, even Muse Glimmer is better.
After arguing and back and forth with Claude (not straight away), it found a kv streaming fork of llama https://github.com/achyudh/llama.cpp and an interesting ascii only model Qwen3.8-27B-ASCII-Condensed-UD-IQ4_XS.gguf . It's running, i'll see how it goes.
It seems so wasteful to spend premium on the hardware for local ai to be shoved into macbook form though. You'd probably save a lot building a compute node you shove under your desk that you connect to with some more comfortable but cheap thin client, maybe a refurbished low spec macbook pro (inb4 I say air or neo and people say they cannot work on inferior screens).
Then again the people working on stuff involving this much local model compute demands probably make enough where they don't care about the couple grand they'd save building their own node. I guess apple will get the bag from being the nicest prebuilt out there in this case.
That's only part of the issue - prefill is horrible prior to M5 class chips.
So it depends on what you're doing. Using it for a fun oracle without feeding it too much context per turn? Sure, an older Max chip is great.
As a coding agent doing meaningful work on a sizable project? Compared to a cheap as chips cloud option, it will take an order of magnitude more time to complete.
Prefill isnt a huge problem with an MoE, but ya, dense models are a non starter before the M5. You are still better off using DeepSeek than a local MoE, but locally running something gives you possibilities if you are on an airplane without internet, or if you want to jump guard rails, or if you want to run a home device server, etc…
Puh i don't know, there might be plenty of new/better chips coming out for AI next year or in 2 years.
Isn't it also rumored that the M7 is reworked for AI?
And Xiaomi announced their AI Cube with 1.2t of bandwidth. Just because Nvidia is protecting its business by giving consumers either compute or bandwidth and Apple being something in between, doesn't mean we can't get both a lot better balanced.
These M7 rumors and that they're skipping the M6 Pro/Max rumors are really making me try to stretch my M1 Pro until next year.
I'm gonna max out most of the specs on the next one I get, would feel insanely wasteful to do that now.
They've been saying the $LATEST_CHIP is better for AI since at least the M3.
Yeah, the price is so high and things are moving so fast I don’t wanna risk committing to something that becomes obsolete in a year. I wanna see the rumoured M7 first. Hopefully hardware demand doesn’t make waiting a stupid decision…
Waiting is never a stupid decision because you can always save a good deal on apple refurbished. I got a mac on bestbuy refurbished a couple years ago shortly after it was released. It had like 4 cycles on the battery and I saved hundreds.
Running Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen 3.8 27B on a M4 Pro with 24 GB - Qwen 3.8 runs fine but is slow and taxes the machine a bit, Gemma 4 on the other hand, is a better experience.
Apple killed M6 Pro, M6 Ultra and M6 Max to focus on AI chip, so yeah that'd be a more sensible option.
I'm running qwen 3.8 flash next with strata (q3 quant) on laptop with 5090 and 128G RAM and OMP harness. At 90t/s speed it is pretty much good enough already.
Will local AI eventually pull the proverbial rug out from under the big providers and the huge sums invested in building out data centers?
Probably not. The ROI for local AI is pretty terrible at best it's like 20 years to see a cost advantage. Most enterprises are going to be fine using hosted models. The two main reasons to use local AI are 1. education and 2. if you cannot use hosted AI for your use case (safety guardrails, payment restrictions, etc.)
>The generation doesn't mater as much to me as the memory bandwidth
I don't know man?
The generation kind of does matter. I'm not gonna lie, matrix multiplication units speed things up considerably. That hardware confers a material change in capability.
Maybe from M5 up, it doesn't matter? But you're definitely going to notice the difference between M1 and M5 for instance.
Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock.
Mini PC with Occulink, EGPU dock, 750w power supply and a refurbished 3090 is 2500. It can run Gemma4:31b at 1000+ tok/sec prefill, ~40 tok/sec generation (which is slow, but a fully connected model is way better for all tasks)
if you want more specialized partial activation models like Qwen, you can get 100+ tok/sec generation.
This beats anything that Apple has by a long shot. And you can also do multi GPU setups if you want slightly slower model loading with usb4/thunderbolt ports.
TLDR; local ai has already been useful for quite some time if you arent brainwashed into believing that Macs are the best for running local inference.
> "Man you Apple Fans really live under a rock... ...refurbished 3090 is 2500"
Before you make assumptions, there are valid reasons for the choice I made:
I paid $1k for a refurbished M1 Max 64GB macbook that can run Qwen 3.8 27B at 24tok/sec (looks like they are about $1.5k on ebay). In my case, Apple was a lot cheaper (used) if you're looking at price-per-token. Yes, it's almost twice as slow as a 3090, but it's also half the price /performance ratio.
Qwen 3.8 27B Q4 with 64k:
3090: ~40tok/sec
M1 Max : ~24tok/sec (MLX)
In fact, the Max can even do 265k context which isn't possible with a single 3090 last I checked (without dropping to Q3-Q2)
> I'd rather have a M1 Max 64GB over a M5 Pro 64GB.
I am one of those: bought the M1 Max with 64gb thinking in running VMs, afterward bought a lighter Air with less memory and ended up using the M1 Max as a kind of luxury for LLMs and multicore computing.
Considering the insane memory price surge it's going to take years (or an eternity) before most people will consider upspecing their machines to run local over paying $20 per month to have the honor to loan a slice of Altman's hardware.
The only hope we have is the AI bubble bursting, but that will undoubtedly come with its own set of macroeconomic surprises.
The ~$1T/y AI capex isn't remotely sustainable. Memory fab capacity will go up, AI datacenter provisioning will go down, prices will become reasonable.
> Memory fab capacity will go up
The fabs are terrified to overscale in case the market collapses before the builds are complete.
> AI datacenter provisioning will go down
Depends on political opposition at both local and national levels. Hard to predict the future, which feeds into the previous point.
What is it with fabs where there is just no competition springing up outside the existing memory cartels? Is the knowledge of how to build and run a fab strictly controlled by these companies? Is all qualified talent just immediately poached and put behind NDA and noncompetes? It just makes no sense. Capitalism would suggest these conditions with so much unstable equilibrium in this market would see increase in supply to take advantage of the pricing. The fact that this isn't playing out as such suggests there are some very powerful thumbs on the scale of this "free" market.
Still on my M1 Max 64GB from release date. Love it. I don't do local AI but this laptop runs so cool and fast I have no reason to upgrade. They really knocked it out of the park on the design.
It feels just as fast as day 1 and I've never had any speed issues. Say what you want about Apple and their pricing and ecosystem but I've been using their hardware for over 20 years now and it's always been top notch.
If you buy their support/AppleCare, your support and warranty is excellent too. They don't skimp. I've seen them go so far past the extra mile it's unreal.
This is also my experience, but when I saw how few tokens/second with a large model it gets locally I was bummed. I’m wondering if I’ll be obligated to upgrade in the near future
Interesting. I have the same machine w/ same specs. I find it sluggish. I think it depends on what you're doing.
You might want to do a full restore or something, my M1 Max isn't sluggish at all.
What are you doing with yours? I recently started using Android/iOS emulators locally and combined with anything else my M1 Pro 32 GB feels unusable.
Definitely grabbing 128 GB + for the next machine.
In this economy?!
I jest...but I'm disgusted by the price gouging going on. Glad my hardware is relatively recent and I had mostly maxed out already when I bought it a few years back. The same setup today would be closer to $7k with equivalent parts.
..really useful on a Mac. FTFY
I'll wait for the M7 iMac with OLED and then never buy it
The modern iMac is the dream desktop that I'm sure Jobs would have loved to live to see, but Apple's laptops have gotten so good there's practically no reason to buy a computer from them that you can't take on the go.
It only makes sense for niche use cases, like your grandpa who is happy to have a single spot in his home for the computer, or a reception desk at a business, etc.
>or a reception desk at a business
This is basically 99% of the proposition of the iMac at this point. If you don't need the specific all-in-one, color, and other design aspects of the iMac or can afford a Studio display, there's no reason not to buy some other display + a Mac mini or a laptop + display
I actually think a desktop makes sense if you want to run local LLMs. I have an M4 Max laptop left to me when I got laid off. It can run good-sized LLMs, but the system heats up, the fans blast off, and it rips through the battery in under an hour. I'd rather have a desktop set up as a private inference server that I could connect to remotely.
Desktop maybe, but Imac that costs more for the same specs of the mini you can shove in the drawer in a desk? I mean with the airspace taken up by an imac you only remotely connect to you could probably have two side by side stacks of I don't know, maybe 20 mac minis each? HPC territory.
Bingo, desktops are still king for actual raw processing. Apple laptops are great, but they're still just computers, given proper cooling and power they can perform even better.
An imac doesn't strike me as a desktop with proper cooling. Maybe they do some funny business in the chassis, but its pretty clear that airflow has been put on the bench in favor of having a sexy thin backside.
The new post Jony Ive design and limitation to 24 inches make it undesirable. I know a lot of folks with older 2007 - 2019 iMacs but none of them who upgraded from those have the new 2020+ one.
I think it's mainly that from 2006 to 2019, the iMac was the only mid-tier desktop that Apple sold. Today, you can get a Mac mini or MBP that's the same or faster than an iMac.
Too relatable.
Though I have had good results buying 1-2 generation old refurbished Macs as my secondary machines or for family members who don’t need cutting edge everything.
It’s even more valuable now that Apple silicon of every generation is more than enough to run every non-power user use case short of newer video games.
Intel macs are fine for non power use. We still have a 2012 that does that. Does chrome spin the fans and is battery life shit? Yes. But it doesn't struggle with it at all. I mean its 4 2.0ghz cores and 16gb of ram, ssd. The other 2012 intel mac I had was dual core but a big dual core, 2.5ghz, and I had that with 16gb and ssd. My m3 pro is only 2.4ghz per core. Graphics is a lot better than intel hd but you aren't going to deal with that in non power use case. m3 pro has all this power and I have to use wine to run basically every game. TF2 over wine on this thing has actually slightly worse performance than TF2 on windows on those intel macs using bootcamp. Native ports are great, civ 5 is basically instant and cold running while barely running on the intel macs, but they don't make many native ports anymore. Old studios that made mac native ports no longer do them. Valve doesn't anymore. Paradox doesn't anymore. AAAs don't really do it anymore either.
All while complaining about the OLED price.
Wait until the ProRes version comes out before you sleep on it permanently.
it will cost a kidney + Apple would remove the keyboard and sell it back to you for 499$.
They'll sell the kidney or the keyboard back to you for $499?
Yes. And we think you're gonna love it.
I can't even get a Temu kidney for less than $999, no way there's an iKidney for less than $30,000
The panel is incredibly thin, but the base is a few inches, and the amount of space it will take up due to tilting the display is also a couple of inches. After a certain point, thinness is a meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever.
The one place where size and thickness don't matter is when it's a non-portable device.
I'm surprised they haven't yet gone the route of making a hyper thin screen and hiding the actual cpu somewhere else (something akin tot he puck for the Apple Vision display). Hell you could probably do a proprietary wireless signal and have the display be completely detached. (Or existing wifi6 or something?)
The edges of the thin monitor could be actual transparent glass.
Thinness has been frivolous aesthetics since Steve Jobs times. A thicker laptop will always mean better thermals, more silence, more battery, repairability, more ports.
In a laptop though that thinness and its compromises might actually provide some positives to the product: lower weight, easier to carry in hand or in a bag
On a desktop you view face on, who fucking cares how thin it is?
Its brand differentiation, and hoping that folks associate the ability to make thinner products as "better technology". Which they seem to, especially when paired with a high cost. I'd be surprised if one of their initial mockups didn't have a transparent bezel around the screen (or the screen itself!) to make it look like a minority-report style screen
it is a piece of furniture though, so aesthetics matter
Effectively yeah, it’s a desk lamp.
You can get it with a VESA mount instead of the base.
>meaningless aesthetic choice that serves no function whatsoever
"And we’re just getting started."
It is an Apple machine, yes.
I wish they would just upgrade the screen size, 24-inch is just too small. My wife is using an old iMac, but we will not buy a new one with this screen size. I don't understand why are there no options to upgrade that. (Although it would probably cost so much it wouldn't worth it at that point)
Still 24 inch screen in 2026. You can get a 27 inch panel for far less than a stick of ram these days. Why not give us a decent sized screen!
They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.
It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.
I was just thinking the same thing. The M-series is so good, the demand for uber-desktops is smaller than ever. And all professionals I know truly want/need the portability of a laptop.
And receptionists! Don't forget receptionists. :)My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.
I’ve felt the same way since way back then ever since reading about this guy’s setup[0], so I paired a 11” MBA with the quad core Mac Mini 2012.
I’ve kept that philosophy over the years, the MBA was replaced by the 2017 12” retina MacBook and then again with the 13” M2 MBA. The Mini gave way to the 2018 Mini, then a M1 Max Studio. I even attempted replacing the MacBook with an iPad though that didn’t really workout.
It’s the best of both worlds really, enough power to do everything when on the go and even more power back at the office.
0: https://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/a-note-about-my-new-mac-set...
That's interesting. (I mean that genuinely. Sometimes when people say that, they mean "You seem crazy")
What's the appeal there? Doing big-RAM-requirement stuff that just won't run on a laptop?
It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.
So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.
A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.
Back in the Intel Mac era, it used to be that running even a single docker/vagrant container would bring any MacBook to its knees, so having a nice beefy machine for doing the Real Work was useful while the MBs were mainly used for lighter work loads while on the go.
Nowadays, the M series chips are so powerful that I’ve not had a real need to use my Studio and work mainly using my M2 Air.
The whole point of having always on machines is you can close your laptop and the rest of the work keeps on going. Like you can leave home and work keeps on keeping on. I've been doing that for like 30 years. In combination, especially if you have a good laptop, then you can have best of the both worlds.
I feel like in 2026 maybe they realized that "pro" users (engineers, designers) mostly just want laptops + external monitors anyway. The Apple Silicon CPUs are so f'ing good, the % of people who need an uber-desktop is smaller than ever.
24" is a good size for casual users which is the main market. You can have two roomy-ish GUI apps (two web pages, etc) side by side.
It's 24" 4k display with perfect 2x scaling. Good luck finding something similar. 24" != 24" HiDPI perfect 2x scaling.
The screen is great quality, but it's simply too small. My wife is a graphic designer currently working on an iMac, and she loves it, but the screen is so small she has to put the iMac in the middle of her desk...
Because then they can't sell you their overpriced 27" screen.
Waited for it so long but.... still no memory option for more than 32GB. It would be nice to have some kind of a pro model.
32GB max memory is ludicrous today. We've regressed as a technological society.
Did you know Moore had two not-as-famous cousins with their own laws? Sam and Leslie.
Sam predicted price-per-transistor-per-square-inch density would asymptote, while Leslie predicted it would level off and then regress.
Leslie's Law is in full effect, it seems.
It's a fairly realistic lower-bound for professional macOS work, if you don't want to thrash the SSD with zram writes.
If you find yourself loading that much stuff in memory you probably need to offshore your compute
Aside from running local LLMs (which is tight on 32GB anyway), what on Earth are people doing that requires 32GB as a bare minimum? I have 24GB on my current MacBook Pro and never find myself limited by it. My work MacBook Pro has 16GB, and that is occasionally a bit tight. However, that's largely because the stingy 512GB SSD quickly fills up, leaving no room for swap, not because I really need more RAM as such.
That said, I don't believe that SSDs can feel pain, so I am quite happy for the OS to thrash them as much as necessary. The fear of SSD failure is massively overblown IMO.
How is it that after 10 years of Apple releases, people are still complaining about it "missing" feature X? Not having every checkbox ticked is Apple's way of having shiny new releases all year round.
the laptop has up to 128G as an option, but also pushes towards 10k for a laptop, insane
The M6 Pro and Max variants with higher memory support have been dropped in favor of accelerating M7.
This has been reported for many months. Sorry if you missed the news, but if you need a much higher memory variant the M5 Pro/Max are what’s available this cycle.
They’re looking for an iMac Pro. Sorry if you didn’t catch that, but M5 Pro / Max are not available in iMac form.
I understand that, but they said they were waiting for a higher memory variant M6, which was not planned. If they need higher RAM they can go M5 Pro/Max (outside of iMac form factor) or wait hopefully for newer iMac Pro variants in the future.
To be honest, I doubt we're going to see iMacs with very high RAM any time soon. RAM is expensive and most people buying high-RAM machines want to bring their own monitor, not get an all-in-one with a small-ish screen.
The maxed out M5 Ultra Mac Studio is only AU$28,700 / US$18,300.
Peripherals not included.
I wish they built an iMac Mini with a square display while being bigger than the HomeView. It's a niche category but a nod to the Macintosh Classic.
I wonder why the iMac still has that chin design and small panel. They’ve been producing displays for long enough that the iMac and Studio Display should have the same form factor.
There may be some technical reasons for it, but I'm not convinced. The chin is a core part of the imac design language. Without the chin it would just be a display and not recognizably different from any other display. The chin is part of the design that that makes it recognizably an imac.
The chin is where Apple puts the logic board and speakers for the iMac. Yes, they could move that behind the display, but I'm guessing that'd make the display thicker (which they wouldn't want) and make the thermals harder. It's certainly something they could engineer, after all the iPad has its logic board behind the display. But it's not like the chin serves no purpose and it probably helps with the thermals and sustained performance and probably makes it easier to engineer everything for what is probably one of their lower volume sellers (compared to iPhones, iPads, MacBooks).
I worked for an AASP in the early 00s and I questioned this, considering that previously the logic boards were actually housed behind the display for both PowerPC and Intel models[0]. This does appear to be mostly true[1] (some of the logic board pokes up beyond the chin).
0: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2309+...
1: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iMac+M3+24-Inch+Teardown:+Ap...
The white plastic iMacs from the PPC and early Intel era were about four times thicker than the current design. Back then they were putting optical drives and 3.5" hard drives and AC power supplies behind the display; now, it's too thin to fit an Ethernet port. The current set of tradeoffs really doesn't make sense to me, but if you accept the thin design as a constraint the continued existence of the chin is pretty obviously necessary; those older iMacs could have much more easily ditched the chin.
There were serious thermal issues with the late 00's 24" iMacs. I had one that ate 3 hard drives, and then the display in about 6 years.
It'd be interesting if they used that power brick tether to drive the display similar to the Samsung Frame, which takes power and signal from a fiber optic cable that runs really easily in a wall. If they could shuttle Ethernet up the power cord, they could send video signal back, too.
Power over fibre?
Makes the angle very easy to adjust.
I used to put post-its on mine too.
Why can't we buy the colored magic keyboard as standalone product?
I would love to have a pink one for my MBP!
I wish they would put these colors on laptops.
For me it's the other way round. I wish they would offer a space-gray or black option like they have on their laptops
Or at least give us the option for a black display surround. The white bezel around the display is such an eyesore...
The old aluminum imacs look so damn good too. Actually feels pro instead of borrowing one of the CareBear's computers.
The design, especially with those colors is gorgeous, yes.
they put some on macbook neos ... But one thing for sure, Apple reserve those flashy colors for entry levels models (Ipad 10/11th gen, Macbook Neo).
Lowest spec config costs £1529 vs £899 for the equivalent Mac mini, but the mini gives you Ethernet and 2 cores. Highest spec goes up to £3099 vs £2299 for a matching mini.
£700/£800 buys you a 24" display (with an unspecified refresh rate, so presumably 60Hz), a keyboard, and a mouse. I loved my 27" iMac to pieces, but it's really hard to justify buying this thing today.
> £700/£800 buys you a 24" display
That's about $1000, and it buys you a 32" 4K OLED panel with a high refresh rate, better than anything the Mac has. That's the kind of monitor you would pair with a gaming rig though, and probably overkill for the kind of office use the Mac is intended for.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The £700/£800 difference between the iMac and the Mac mini doesn't buy you as much as you'd hope. It's just not very good value at all.
If I were buying a display for work (which is to say, mostly programming), my choice would probably be the £600 BenQ RD280UG — a 28" 3840x2560 display, which is 4k vertically enlarged to a 3:2 ratio.
It's like a 24" MacBook Pro with no keyboard and less portable?
If it were back to 27" and hidpi screen again it might make sense
They are _still_ featuring magic mouse on the promo photos for the iMac
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/mxk53am/a/magic-mouse-usb...
I love the magic mouse, had one going since 2016 and it is still great. Not a fan of their keyboards but the swipe + scrolling exp. on the magic mouse is great IMO.
I also find Apple keyboards terrible. The keyboards we have today feel worse than the ones from 20 years ago.
Same. I'm also a Magic Mouse person.
It's still the standard Apple mouse, no? Why wouldn't they include it in the promo photos?
The Magic Trackpad is a far better pointing device (partly because the OS is so trackpad-focused, partly due to the Mouse's poor/outdated hardware). I'm surprised Apple still isn't pushing it as the "standard."
24" only! Why not offer 27" iMac that Apple used to make before?
The colours are a nice touch though I wish they’d bring back a little more whimsy into the designs. These things are obviously more display piece than workhorses now with all that flamboyant colouring, so go all out? Maybe give it a larger border radius, or made the rear end rounder. Oh heck, make the entire screen round even! Bring back the puck mouse and make a puck keyboard!
No.
24” and 60hz…
It’s intentional product segmentation. Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary.
Off topic but doesn't intel do something weird where some i3 chips can use ecc but not i5 or i7 until you get into server chips? I remember seeing that when plotting nas builds a couple years ago. Should have pounced on actually building it then....
> Just like Intel not shipping ECC for client SKUs when DDR5 design makes it really necessary
The ECC in DDR5 is on-die ECC and that's not "real" ECC, it's what DDR5 needs to not fail. Side-band ECC is the standard method, employing extra memory chips and 72bit memory. OEMs mix these in the marketing materials to fool the users into thinking they buy the better option.
Yes, here I'm referring to actual ECC, not the on-die ECC. All DDR5 chips have on-die ECC as a prerequisite just to reach error levels comparable to standard non-ECC DDR4, but from a hardware analysis perspective, even with the on-die ECC, DDR5 still needs ECC more than DDR4 (which already needed it).
Perfect for the target audience!
My wife used to mock me for being adamant about 120hz+ monitors, until the day I had her try my 200hz monitor for an entire day.
Her eyes were much less tired at the end of the day.
Does she use f.lux on her usual rig? That saved my eyes like 15 years ago whenever I found it and that was on the low dpi screens to boot. Make sure you use the setting to match it to your lighting conditions.
I read similar reports so many times, when I got my 165hz screen I got disappointed. I also disable it on my phone to get more battery life. Different folks, different strokes.
I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.
It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.
How many watts are you saving with that, realistically? If that few minutes of extra battery is a game changer, you need a bigger battery, not a worse screen.
I can just go in to settings and turn the battery size up?
Never thought I'd meet someone who's eyes can't see "more than X Hz anyways".
I wish I could be like you, because going back to 60Hz feels like everything is stuttering for me.
I have a 60hz monitor and a 144hz monitor and I simply can't tell the difference in normal usage. I can see a difference on something like http://testufo.com if I specifically look for it, and until I checked that I assumed the OS was just lying to me and the monitor was actually set to 60hz.
What phone is that? I thought they all had variable refresh rate nowadays.
If you mean LTPO, most in fact don't have it.
Available at 1829 euros for the basic configuration, nah.
Looks like they it still comes with a "magic mouse", of course the only thing "magic" about it is having a worse sensor than a $5 Logitech.
Looks like its an easy $40-60 to be made listing it on ebay if you don't want it. That can get you a nice logitech mouse. I like my G305.
Waiting for 512 GB Mac Studio M5 Ultra still. I guess they are rolling things out now, it has been expected for late October.
The M5 Ultra with 256GB went from a early Dec estimated delivery to Feb now. I wonder what the 512GB lead time will be.
24" and not 27" monitor?
Would have bought one otherwise.
I love these things. Never going to buy one. But I love what they are doing with them.
The iMac continues to be an aesthetically pleasing machine I sorely want for my space, yet one I cannot justify because of its anemic innards relative to my desired use cases.
It’s just a really good looking computer, especially with the accessories. Give me one with an M6 Pro and a 128GB memory cap, and they can take my money as I move my homelab and AI compute onto it.
The title text animation is really cute, props to whoever made this!
The problem with getting a new Mac is then you're stuck with macOS 27 with Liquid Glass.
27 is fine, fixed a lot of the issues in 26.
macOS 27 is pretty good. They walked back a lot of the poor changes from 26
Do people still actually buy iMacs?
They are very popular amongst the elderly. Well specifically those of us setting the elderly up with a computer.
Mechanically straightforward since it’s all in one. Pretty much just the power cable, keyboard and mouse. Pretty unbreakable ux wise, reliably sleeps with little power draw and wakes up quickly without them questioning if it’s broken. Reasonably unobtrusive updates so they don’t go turning them off. Etc.
Yup. My 80-year-old father is replacing his Intel iMac with one of these tomorrow. (photo editing, 3D design for printing)
We thought long and hard about a Mac Mini — and not happy about going from 27" to 24" — but a Studio Display doubles the price and he's not willing to take another chance on third-party stuff.
Popular with people who want to give a kid a computer between elementary and high school age, does everything a kid needs. With the bonus of not having to worry about your kid wasting time playing games.
That motherfucking display sill runs at only 60hz?!??
The maximum of 32 GB RAM has to be a joke. My Linux laptop has more RAM, more SSD, more CPU at the same price, and it can run games on top of that. Hard pass, even if I were to tolerate the OS.
That’s the crazy thing, not everything has to be for you.
I want one and I don't know what I'd do with it
I still think those expensive Apple monitors (which even had RAM) were intended to be 'iMac Pros,' but due to stagnant growth in the all-in-one market, they never saw the light of day.